


A Bell is a Cup Until it is Struck

by sterne



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Abuse, Anxiety, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Corporal Punishment, Corporal Punishment of a Minor, Dissociation, Flogging, Impact Play, M/M, Not A Lot Of Plot, Paddling, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Really Just a Lot of Hitting, Spanking, Strapping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-28 03:17:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10822629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sterne/pseuds/sterne
Summary: The secret education of Armitage Hux.The first part of Chapter One appeared as part of week 6 (I think) of the Kylux Cantina.





	A Bell is a Cup Until it is Struck

Armitage’s heart floats with pride and excitement as he walks along the darkened corridor of the Star Destroyer, its halls smelling, as always, of dust and institutional cleaning fluids. Today is his tenth birthday, and he has been called to his father’s office.

Normally, no particular effort is made to acknowledge his birthday, but perhaps there is something different about this year. Five years after the final defeat of the Empire at the Battle of Jakku (which he doesn’t even remember), the adults are noticeably more optimistic; things seem to be settling into a more stable course, and as more planets are seeded with refugees and begin to produce food, the famine-like conditions of the previous years have eased a little. Maybe he will even get a small cake or some other special treat, shared just between him and his father because there certainly wouldn’t be enough for any of his classmates.

 _Not that I’d want any of them to have a bite of my treat anyway,_ he thinks.

He arrives and performs a quick check to make sure that his new uniform of grey tunic, black pants, and ankle boots is neat and presentable, then knocks upon the office door, only opening it and entering once he hears the brusque command, “Come,” from inside.

“Do you know why you are here today?” his father asks.

A thread of wariness starts winding through him at this unexpected question. _Not for my birthday, then._ He stiffens his back muscles to hold his slender body as uprightly as he is able and then replies, “No, sir.”

“You have nothing to tell me about what happened in Captain Piett’s Navigational Mathematics class yesterday?”

At this, a chill comes over him with the realization that he is here to be reprimanded - not for any kind of treat at all. Why had he let himself think otherwise? _Stupid._ Shame makes his voice smaller than he’d like. “I…I fell asleep at my desk, sir.”

“You will never amount to anything if you cannot show respect and pay attention to your teachers and superior officers.” Commandant Hux’s face takes on its familiar expression of distaste and disappointment as he gazes at his son, then turns slightly aside to look down as he pulls open one of the drawers of his desk. “Perhaps this will help you learn to focus, then. Hold out your hands, palms up, one on top of the other.”

 _Not just a reprimand, then - a punishment._ The rapid shift from excited anticipation to wariness to fear washes through his body leaving only the buzzing feeling of anxiety in his stomach. He can guess what’s in that drawer, even though he’s never seen it before. He’s heard the other students speak of it with a sort of terrified awe…the strap. It is a long, flat strip of leather - about the same width as his own slim wrist - folded over, with the ends secured in a wooden handle.

He straightens again, pushing his shoulders back a little further, stiffens his arms, and holds his hands out, palms up, the right cradling the left. Armitage can only stand and watch as his father raises the leather strap with a firm grip on its handle, flicks it up over his shoulder, then snaps it forward and down at high speed into his small, waiting palm. The shock of pain arrives in a sharp burst and it takes all of the willpower that he can muster to keep his hands steady and not cry out.

The Commandant raises the strap, again bringing it back down rapidly, and this time the pain is even more intense, layering on top of the scalding sting of the initial strike. Down comes another, and another, and another. Armitage’s awareness has constricted to two things: the refulgent burning sensation in his palm, and maintaining his rigid posture.

“Switch.”

Obedience has been very thoroughly drilled into him; the idea of doing anything other than putting his right hand in his left and enduring whatever his father chooses to mete out doesn’t even enter into his consciousness. He can feel the warmth of the blood throbbing and burning under the surface of his abused left palm where it touches and heats the back of his right hand.

The right palm duly receives its five servings of torture from the strap.

The unprecedented agony in his palms draws all of his consciousness away from perceiving anything but these few square inches of skin, until he is nothing but a mere incarnation, enduring. He centers himself around the immensity of containing and withstanding the sensation until he is pushed - until he pulls himself through a veil and slips out of his body altogether.

In these few endless moments, he has made what he does not yet realize will be a life-altering discovery: that he can sever his mind from his body and withdraw from these physical perceptions, withdraw into his mind, and leave the pain out there, far away. Far away, in his hands. And what are they, anyway? Just some skin, blood, meat, and bone. That’s not _him_ , only his body. It’s actually quite peaceful in here, in his mind, with all of its usual thought patterns shorn away to make room for the imperative task of keeping the immensity of pain at a remove. He is so absorbed in this revelation that it takes him a moment to realize that his father is speaking to him.

“I said, I trust you have learned a lesson here, Cadet.”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

\-----

Armitage is annoyed, more than anything else, as he makes his way to the Commandant’s (the term ‘Father’ is used now only in his thoughts when he forgets himself) office. He’s made this same trip, and endured what happens - the only thing, for him, that ever happens there - inside that office, perhaps a dozen times in the seven years since his first visit on his tenth birthday.

The instructors of the Academy are not, by and large, a capricious lot; he knows he is an exemplary student who has given no cause to any of them lately that would have precipitated the upcoming punishment...so it must have been one of _them_.

Them. Those awful products of his father’s special training and conditioning experiments. Technically, these cadets are also his to command, and they do obey his direct orders. But they also are like mesmerizing vipers, eyes and ears always swaying and swiveling around everything he does, looking for any suggestion of weakness, looking for any place to strike. Maker knows what it is this time. An untied shoelace? A flimsi carelessly left on his military-cornered bedspread instead of being properly stowed away in his desk?

Whatever the cause for today’s summons, it’s best just to let it happen, so that he can return to the calculations this little visit has interrupted - it’s a new concept for a superweapon that he has only begun fleshing out in his spare time after school work and drills and training exercises are finished. He knows in his marrow that this could be a ground-breaking idea, even if all the pieces have not even begun to cohere together.

It’s not without effort that he turns his attention away from that beguiling constellation of thoughts and thrilling possibilities to the reality with which he is now being forced to deal. Time to re-enact the familiar routine. His body knows what to do.

He knocks, enters upon command, and without any real volition on his part, his mind slowly begins trying to seep into that other place it goes; that other place it has learned to go when he must be present in this office. This office, which seems to exist outside the normal rules of time and space. It’s completely unchanged since the first time he saw it years ago, and it feels to him, as always, like an indrawn and held breath, never exhaled. This office, the only place where his father, _no, the Commandant_ , he reminds himself, ever touches him, although not with his hands of course.

He realized some time ago that the Commandant enjoys this perverse and loveless form that their relationship has taken. Patient observation and analysis of all known facts has brought him inevitably to the working hypothesis that the Commandant takes pleasure in hurting him in lieu of punishing himself for his transgression with a lowly kitchen servant...and for the audacity of that servant - a nobody! - who nonetheless accomplished what his high-born wife couldn’t, the simple act of reproduction. It makes no difference, though; understanding why things are the way they are changes nothing. His father still hates him, still hates the fact that he is needed as an heir. His mother still abandoned him. His erstwhile protector Rae Sloane has not been heard from in some time. He has only himself to rely upon, as always.

He indulges for a few moments in this line of dead end thought in a way that’s much like the simple (but counterproductive) pleasure of picking a scab, then ruthlessly brushes it aside. A flex of his jaw and a flare of his nostrils are the only outward indications that any internal shift has occurred. The familiar cloud of scents (the warm plastic of flimsi, burnt hair electrical dustiness of the holoprojector, stale caf, the acrid tang of his father’s uniform) that are part of the timeless reality of the office takes over his attention and from there it’s easy to let himself begin the familiar flow away from his body and into the other place. An errant thought floats up into his awareness - idle curiosity about why he’s here today. He has to exert himself a little to pause the comfortable dreamy drift of his mind and actually listen for a moment to what is being said to him.

 _Fifteen swats? For kriffing smoking?? What a joke. I wonder which one of the little shits was the snitch?_ After that, no need to verbalize his thoughts, even if it is only to himself. He’s long since become inured to what comes next, and it takes only the a minimal functioning of his will to release the clasp on his belt, unbutton his uniform trousers, lower them to his thighs, and bend over the desk. He has a brief moment to recall, almost nostalgically, the snap of the strap against his palms. But that was for Lower Division boys; for several years now, it’s been the belt, on his bare buttocks.

The first strike slams into his ass, biting into the scant padding of muscle and fat there. It punches the breath he’s been holding out in a rush, so he tenses his back muscles more tightly and stiffens his grip on the edge of the desk. A deep sting penetrates his tactile awareness, thick and inescapable. The second strike lands slightly lower to light up new pain receptors but this time he is ready and lets out a controlled slow breath upon impact, forcing his his knees and hips to unlock as he relaxes into the the moment of reprieve before the third strike and...there. He slips entirely out of his body and into the serene space of pure thought. The barrier between his conscious and unconscious mind is thinnest at these times and it is utterly intoxicating to feel so close to the workings of his deepest levels of cognition. In here, in this place he only seems to be able to access at the extremity of pain, the usual constant mental susurrus of observation, noticing, categorizing, analyzing, planning, scheming - all is muted and stilled.

In a distant way, he is aware of the continued strikes of the belt up and down the surfaces of his buttocks and upper thighs. It’s an inferno of hellfire, but he holds himself, holds his mind, aside from it, encapsulated in a buffering shroud of nothingness. The Commandant and his dreary little office are only shadows, scarcely visible, and of little importance.

Armitage's body absorbs each hit. The kinetic energy of each impact, the searing agony of his burning buttocks where even now blood is seeping from a few cuts, and the psychic blunt force trauma that his father is once again doing this to him - in a moment of transcendence, all of this fuses together with unformed images and proto-ideas that rise up from the depths of his subconscious mind. The vision forms clearly: a superweapon that absorbs energy from a star of intense heat and power. Holds it, contains it, transforms it. Is transformed by it. Redirects it outward, in an incandescent blaze of destruction. The sheer brightness of this world-ending arrow of ruin blurs into a whiteout of his mind’s eye but the conceptual framework remains, lodging itself firmly in his consciousness even as red-hot reality explodes what remains of the illusion and his awareness is abruptly yanked back into the prison of flesh.

It’s the break in the pace of strikes of the belt that does it. The session is over. He is panting and shuddering, pressing himself against the unyielding wood of the Commandant’s desk in an effort to keep his legs from buckling. He slowly gathers his composure, imposing rigid control over his breathing _in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four_ to slow and deepen it, and gradually he establishes a remote sort of calmness. It’s enough that he’s able to straighten his body and gingerly pull his trousers up over his throbbing, burning ass to cover himself.

“Dismissed,” he hears the Commandant say, so he takes his leave with as much dignity as he can pretend to having.

Not once has he looked his father in the eye, or spoken a word. And back in his room, a killing stream of hate and light is on his mind as he sketches out the first schematic for what will become Starkiller Base.

\-----

Lieutenant Armitage Hux sits on his bunk on First Order Ship _Vengeance_ , a year into his first posting as a commissioned officer, and wonders what is wrong with him. Not what is wrong with him in an existential way - he dismissed that question, unanswered, ages ago. No, his concern is what is wrong with him, right now. He is edgy and distractible, and adhering to his usual regimented patterns of activity is increasingly difficult. His temper is short - shorter than normal - and he feels...itchy. Jumpy. A bit like there is a low voltage current running through him intermittently, but persistently. His stomach feels sour and flippy, all the time. His skin is somehow both too tight and too thin to contain the thrumming, skittery energy that is rising, rising.

He has had all the appropriate vaccinations and antivirals relevant to this sector of the galaxy. He has not eaten any unfamiliar or tainted food. He doesn’t feel ill, exactly, just very out of sorts. _I cannot just sit here, boxed up in this little room,_ he thinks, and with that, he springs up from the bed and is out the door and into the hall. _A walk might dispel some of this feeling,_ he hopes.

He sets a quick-cadenced pace and shortly has gone from one end to the other of the Star Destroyer’s large central corridor. The feeling of space and airiness there brings a little calm, but it’s starting to fill up with people at the shift change, so he turns off into a smaller hallway, almost at random. This hallway - he knows it. One of the officers’ lounges - the better, quieter one - is at the end. _A drink, that’s not a bad idea...maybe they will have some of that ice wine from Hoth,_ he muses, and strides through the door. He greets the few officers he knows, and when the bar attendant confirms that they do indeed have the ice wine, it feels like a good omen. He takes the tall, slender glass and moves to an empty booth with a partial view of a large transparisteel window.

The ice wine is chilled and sweet, slightly mineralic in flavor. _This was the right idea, coming here._ He settles back further against the tufted backrest and lets the muted flow of conversations from nearby tables and booths flow past, unremarked until one word sticks in his ear, _brothel_. Armitage turns his head slightly so that his ear is pointed in the direction of that particular conversation, taking place among four young men.

“..anything there,” he overhears, and then, “girls, boys, xeno..”  
  
“What! Really?”  
  
“I saw them myself! And they will do anything. Anything you want. They even have, uh, special equipment…”  
  
“Equipment!” - and there is a round of laughter at this titillating quirk.  
  
“Yeah, for, like, whipping and stuff.”

Whatever was said next doesn’t register in Armitage’s brain, because his attention is still caught by that phrase _whipping and stuff. Is...whipping and stuff. A...service? A service one may just. Just, purchase?_ His thoughts are stuttering at this completely unexpected revelation. He knows what a brothel is, even though he’s never been to one. The urge toward sexual activity is not something that has troubled him overmuch; certainly not so much that he would pay for it. But, _whipping and stuff._ His stream of consciousness brings forth, in vivid detail, recollections of the feelings of clarity, of purity and expiation, that always followed his visits to his father’s...to the Commandant’s office.

 _Maybe that is what is wrong with me. It has been almost two years since the last. Maybe I need. I need. I need to be whipped._ As soon as the thought is articulated, he knows it is true. Deeply true. _How did I not understand this about myself before?_

He sets that question aside as irrelevant, and focuses in on the men’s conversation again, gleaning the name and location of the brothel. He resolves to go there on his next shore leave.

\-----

He’s both excited and a little anxious on the shuttle down to Aarfa’s main spaceport and town, Mitre Peak. Some careful eavesdropping and discreet research has given him an idea of what to expect at the brothel, but he dislikes going into any situation in which he does not have a firm grasp of all the variables and possibilities, and so cannot entirely dispel the fizz of anxiety that fills his stomach and creeps up his lower back.

He makes his way from the landing pad to the pleasure district, not even needing to ask for directions since a thick stream of officers and soldiers is flowing as one toward a brightly lit row of streets. He spots ‘Annold House’ painted in aurebesh on the wall of a corner building and hesitates only briefly before crossing the threshold.

Inside, it is not as garish as he had feared, but there’s no mistaking the sort of business that occurs on the premises. The lighting is low and the walls are covered with gauzy fabric; low and earthy-sounding music from some unseen source is just audible over the murmur of many conversations, and the air is redolent with sweet smell of spice, death sticks, and the sharp pungence of alcohol. Barely clothed beings of all descriptions mingle, smiling and touching, among the paying customers.

A woman in a revealing dress approaches and he cannot stop himself from a furtive scan of the nearest patrons to make sure that there are none he recognizes from the _Vengeance_ before he turns his attention to her.

“What do you seek, sir?”, she asks in a pleasant, businesslike tone, making no move to touch him.

He tenses his abdominal muscles and pushes his shoulders back slightly, not really aware that he’s done so, but it helps him to feel grounded and strong. Bravado and a hint of shame push his answer out a little more stridently than he intended.

“Do you provide…”, he falters. _Just say it, Armitage!_ “...whipping here?”

This question, however artlessly delivered, brings no look of revulsion or scorn to the woman’s face, to his relief. “We do, sir. If you’ll follow me?”

His shoulders relax and he follows her as they pass through a long hallway, leaving the sounds and smells of the main salon behind. She brings him to a small room containing a large cabinet and two chairs set at an angle to one another. Smiling, she gestures at one of them and departs.

He’s too anxious to sit, though. Almost immediately, a man a few years older than Armitage, clean-cut with military bearing, enters, holding a datapad.

“Welcome to Annold House. I’m Revis. This is your first time here, yes?” he asks, glancing at the datapad, then back up at Armitage, who replies in the affirmative.

“Alright, I just need to know what you want in your scene.”

“My...scene?”

“Yes, you _are_ here for a flagellation scene, are you not? I just need to know how you want it.”

It had not occurred to him that he would have to say anything beyond “Do you provide whipping here?”. Embarrassment, shame, and anxiety push their way back up and begin picking his composure apart. The thought to flee the room forms in his mind, but the other man is a professional and picks up on this instantly.

“Shall I tell you the options?” he asks.

That takes the edge off the jittery urge to bolt. “Yes, thank you.”

Revis lists the possible personnel (male, female, other, nongender; human, xeno, droid - one, more than one), tools (strap, belt, cane, switch, whip, crop, paddle, bare or gloved hand, flail, cat), and scenarios (roleplay, restraint, exibitionism, intercourse, nude, clothed, “and more”).

Armitage is genuinely taken aback by all of these options - he had no idea that these things were part of what he has heretofore considered a straightforward and simple activity - and he doesn’t fully understand what some of choices even are.

“Just, just one man, and may I see all of these tools that you mentioned? No scenarios. No talking. No intercourse. I’ll keep my clothes on.” All he wants is something as close as possible to his experiences in the Commandant’s office.

“And for how long, or how much?” Revis asks. Armitage thinks back on his last few sessions in the office.

“Fifteen strikes, I think, will be sufficient.”

“And if you change your mind and want to end before that, or if you want to continue beyond the fifteen, what words will you use?”

“Er, ‘stop’ and ‘more’?” Revis smiles at this, and makes a note in his datapad.

They turn to the cabinet. Hanging inside are a dozen or so implements, some of which give Armitage a pang of familiarity when he notices them - the strap so like the one the Commandant used; likewise the belt. He eyes the other tools with interest, but his attention quickly settles on a rounded, flat wooden paddle a little larger than the width of his own hand, with a stubby handle. The surface area of it...he is already imagining how it will feel. “That one,” he says, decisively.

“Very well, sir. Let me show you to your room...and I will need your credit chip now, please.”

He doesn’t even ask how much this is going to cost him, simply hands over his credit chip and watches as it’s scanned into the datapad. It pings at the completion of the transaction, and Revis shows him to another room, this one larger and appointed with a waist-high padded bench, a bed with a sturdy-looking headboard and footboard, an armchair, and large object composed of two thick wooden beams attached in the middle to form an X. He regards the latter warily and gravitates toward the bench.

“This is to your satisfaction?” Revis asks. Armitage nods, not really sure what his satisfaction is, but prepared to experience this nonetheless.

“I’ll just give you a moment to ready yourself.” he says, and leaves the room.

 _It will be him, then,_ Armitage thinks. _That is acceptable. He could almost be a soldier..._

There is still a little shame underlying his awareness in this moment; shame that he needs this, needs to purchase such a service from a brothel...shame that he is about to bare his buttocks to another man. Shame, and worry. _What if this doesn’t work? What if it was not the act itself, but the setting or the person doing the hitting that made it such a release for me? Or the fact that it was forced upon me against my will? There’s really no other way to know other than what I am doing right now_. He unfastens his pants, pushing them down just enough to expose his ass, and leans down to rest his torso on the bench. It’s much more comfortable than the hard desk to which he had been accustomed.

Revis enters, and instantly Armitage feels his face warm with embarrassment at the picture he knows he must make - scrawny, bony, needy - but before he can dwell on that last thought, a warm hand rests gently on his exposed cheek, then pats it lightly, as if to ask ‘ready?’. He can’t suppress a flinch, so the hand pats again. The realization that this is actually happening, is about to happen, hits him suddenly. He only entered the building perhaps five minutes ago. _A stranger, a man, a...prostitute. Is looking at my ass. He can see my balls and probably part of my dick, even. He is about to hit me with a paddle. And...and I want this. I’m paying for it. I want it. I am choosing to allow it._ As he reaches the end of this thought progression, a feeling of clarity and calmness suffuses throughout his entire body and he relaxes his weight down onto the bench.

He doesn’t even hear Revis raise the paddle.

 **SLAP.** The terrific sting is distributed across a broader area than he has previously experienced. **SLAP.** Now on his other cheek. **SLAP.** A little lower, back on the first cheek. **SLAP.** There’s a pleasant feeling of warmth spreading across the thickest part of his buttocks, but, really, this isn’t going to be enough.

“Harder,” he barks, and when a harder - a much harder - _**SLAP**_  comes in response to his command, elation spirals, leaving him almost giddy. Another slap, and now, now the pain is mounting; his ass is on fire, and the slaps keep coming, building layer upon layer of intense heat on his skin and now reaching further and further into the muscle below...he stretches and elongates his back in an effort to ease the intensity of this localized sensation and withdraws a bit, mentally, just to mute things a little and then...oh, the blessed relief! His mind drifts apart, away, across the barrier between the everyday world and the secret, hallowed inner world. It has been so long since he has felt this profound peace. He floats there for what seems like hours, no thoughts forming to pull his attention elsewhere, no concerns hooking into him, only muffled silence and nothingness. Eventually, a thought coalesces: _Hmm? What is that? Someone is asking me a question_. His attention slowly rises to the surface... _the man, here in the brothel...he’s asking_ “Sir? Shall I continue?”

 _Was that really only fifteen? Should I do more? Probably wouldn’t just...drift away, again, though._ “No, that will be all”, he replies, and Revis makes a discreet departure after placing a glass of water and a little jar of some sort of salve on the bench next to Armitage's head.

As he lies prone on a padded bench in a soldier’s brothel on a dull backwater planet, naked, abused ass on display and nerves firing in a cacophony of stinging, blazing heat; sweating and breathing heavily, twenty-two year old First Order Lieutenant Armitage Hux knows that he has never felt happier or more contented in his entire life.

**Author's Note:**

> I think I've tagged appropriately, but this is my first post here so please let me know if you think otherwise. I'm on Tumblr. There will be additional tags in the next chapter.


End file.
